THE LOGAN’S RUN ANALOGIES
LOGAN’S RUN is the perfect analogy of life in the spiritual wasteland of the 21st century. We may not be living physically in an underground city like Logan and his friends, but the last few generations, and especially this generation— we have been and are living in the spiritual equivalent.
What makes the film so incredibly powerful is its accurate depiction of the circumstances which keep us from realizing our own situation. If you are born into a System and have been taught by that system all of your life, you really have no way of knowing if that System is in error. You would have to get outside the system far enough to escape its influence entirely— and then you’d see for yourself what was wrong. But then you’d have another problem. The people still in the System might mark you as a renegade, and they might not listen to you when you came back to tell them that the System is actually dangerous.
I’m now 67 years old and I was raised in the System. Although I was always an iconoclast ( a person who attacks cherished beliefs and institutions which he thinks are wrong or foolish) I really didn’t know what was wrong. (I remember writing a poem in High School called The Queen Is a Raisin in which I attacked everything, just to be sure I hit anything.)
Then when I saw Logan’s Run in 1976 I realized I wasn’t alone. A lot of other people suspected “there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.” (Buffalo Springfield). It took me another four years of reading, asking questions, putting my head in the noose and backtracking to finally discover the flaw.
That’s why I started ANALOGYMAN. The world around us can’t bury the essential questions forever. The System may have us buffaloed, but it can’t erase our consciences and our intuition— and when we follow the footprints, “the splinters in our mind”, the footprints lead us to a bigger interpretation of ultimate reality than what we were taught in school.
I escaped in May of 1980. You can’t know the amount of influence the System has until you escape. In the Logan’s Run Analogies I try to set the stage for you escape the system too. And don’t start with an attitude of complete unbelief— obviously there has to be a way of escape, otherwise an Ultimate Escape movie like Logan’s Run would never have made it off the ground— or lasted as long, with as big a following as it has.
One thing I need to warn you about. There are people in this world who have escaped out of the System because their parents escaped it before they were born. Such people take their freedom for granted. And such people may be offended by my attempt to bridge two worlds— the world of the System, and the world beyond the System. I’m not ashamed to be called a bridge builder. I grew up in the wrong world and escaped…and now I’m building a bridge to reach out to those who are still trapped in the system. That bridge is not designed to encourage the escapees to come back into the System. The System encourages the kind of sensuality you see in Logan’s Run. The nudity in Logan’s Run is tame in comparison to the stuff we see in movies today. At the time, it was a pretty shocking film. But it was never intended to be titillating— it was intended to shock us out of our “comfortable pews”.
I hope you have the courage and the discipline to read through this new series of analogies. If you pick up what I picked up 40 years ago, this series will have been well worth your time and effort.
CLICK HERE : LINK TO FIRST EPISODE
Finally, Logan’s Run is exceptionally fertile ground— so there are some more analogies which I will post later, so stay tuned.